I am fairly new around here, although not new to Android. Forgive me if I am wrong in posting this. I searched and can't find a question that addresses this.

When viewing the questions list, the timestamps frequently show as very recent, but if I open the question, all the activity could be months or years old. None of the comments or answers correspond to the time stamp in the list and nothing shows as edited. I understand this is probably normal behavior, but can someone explain the purpose? Or point to an answer that explains this?

Thanks for the information and the great community, and again, I apologize if this post is out of line. Cheers!

1 Answer
1

There could be a couple of reasons for this. If you have a specific question in mind that you'd like an explanation for then feel free to point it out and I (or someone else) can take a look, but off the top of my head a few possibilities would be:

If the question's last activity is attributed to Community♦ and there are no edits/modifications, then it's often (but not necessarily always) because Community♦ will periodically bump old unanswered questions to the front page, to give them additional visibility. I don't know if this is really explained anywhere, but the profile description for Community♦ does note this.

If a question is reopened, it will get bumped to the front page, but there isn't any immediately obvious activity on it. You can see the close/reopen activities in the post's revision history, though.

It's possible that someone posted a comment, spam, or other non-answer as an answer, which was then subsequently deleted. You'll still see the activity on the front page of the site, but you won't be able to see the deleted post without 10k reputation, so it will seem like some kind of phantom activity took place. If the account is a spam account, then it may be destroyed, which will attribute the activity (on the front page) to Community♦ instead of the original poster.

I may be missing some other situations here as well, but I would say that these are the most common on our site.

That pretty much covers what I was asking. Thanks for the clarification. I had seen Community♦ pop up on some of the posts I was questioning so that likely explains it. I guess I just have to get used to the mentality that answering old questions is OK considering that most other sites would just let the question die to avoid clutter. Thanks again!
– abqnmFeb 14 '14 at 16:53